Great trades never ring a bell. They don’t come with fanfare. They come wrapped in uncertainty, quiet conviction, and a little discomfort. That’s how you know they matter.
Take Cocoa futures. One of the cleanest breakouts we’ve seen recently, but it didn’t feel clean until after it moved.
Before that, it was all noise and indecision.
Here’s the setup we outlined in October 👇
We were betting that the breakdown to new lows wasn’t going to stick.
Why? The 14-day RSI was firmly in a bullish momentum regime.
That’s a characteristic of an uptrend… Not a downtrend!
Moreover, this was a textbook consolidation after a historic 190% bull run which unfolded over 4 months.
Here’s how the setup unfolded 👇
The price ripped back above support and hit our target at the upper bound of the range in just a few weeks.
It was an epic bear trap…
Admittedly, this worked much better than we expected.
From the pits of 19th-century speculation to today’s systematic hedge funds, trend following has remained the ultimate trading edge. Here’s why it works—and why it always will.
For centuries, traders have tried to predict markets—chasing news, studying fundamentals, and searching for a perfect formula to outthink the crowd. Meanwhile, the only strategy that actually worked was the simplest one: Follow the trend.
Nobody wanted to believe it. Trend following felt too passive, too reactive. Human nature prefers action, control, and the illusion of certainty. But markets don’t reward ego. They reward discipline.
The Unspoken Truth of Early Trading
Trend following wasn’t born in a lab. It wasn’t a theory crafted by economists. It was a survival mechanism.
In the 1900s, the most powerful traders—Gould, Patten, Cutten, Livermore—moved markets through insider knowledge, manipulation, and sheer size. The only way smaller traders survived was by recognizing the trend and riding the moves made by the big players.